The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides: review

Like his contemporaries Jonathan Franzen and Marilynne Robinson, Jeffrey Eugenides currently publishes at the unhurried pace of one novel a decade. As a follow-up to his Pulitzer Prize-winning Middlesex, The Marriage Plot carries an inevitable weight of expectation. This perhaps preordains it to be another lengthy tome, as if 10 years’ worth of eclectic detail and subplot need to be crammed in.

The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides

“To start with, look at all the books”, exhorts the first sentence, and everywhere you look in this novel there are other books. “The marriage plot” refers to the goings on in 19th-century novels, and Eugenides’s slightly nerdy premise is to see whether it can still work in a modern American novel.

He has described his modern love story as “a college romance” but it is also a coming-of-age story. It is set in the early Eighties, perhaps because that’s when it began to be OK not to get married and easier to get unmarried, or perhaps because Eugenides does a fantastic line in nostalgia cut with scepticism.

The Eighties was also the decade when semiotics and deconstruction were the revolutionary new literary theories, and the novel heavily relies on the author’s own time at Brown University.

Starting on their graduation day in 1982, it follows a year in the lives of three characters, who make up a love triangle: “Mitchell loved Madeleine, who loved Leonard Bankhead, who loved marking notches on his dick.”

Billy Idol’s White Wedding is playing, and Madeleine, despite being “Incurably Romantic”, has a dubious stain on her dress from the previous night’s drunken mistake. Leonard, with his bandana and chewing tobacco, his depression and feverish intelligence, resembles the late David Foster Wallace, while Detroit-born Mitchell is a mouthpiece for Eugenides’s own youthful religious questioning.

He begins a tangential spiritual quest, working in Mother Teresa’s Home for the Dying in Calcutta, an unlikely seeming move until you find it’s what Eugenides himself did after college.

While all around her are abandoning narrative for the new gods of literary theory, Madeleine guiltily revels in the plots of Austen and Eliot. Since Eugenides’s strategy is to reveal the characters through the books they read, we get disquisitions on everything from reproduction in yeast cells to the life of St Teresa of Avila, and references to Saussure and Handke.

In Middlesex Eugenides wrote convincingly of Calliope/Cal’s life as both a girl and a man. Here his switches between gender perspectives are occasionally regrettable.

His writing has always had shades of soap opera, but here there are a couple of seriously schlocky sex scenes, in which we're told alarmingly that Leonard’s penis is so large it is “almost a third presence in the bed”.

Conflicted attitudes to sexual roles, amid the rise of feminist theory, are part of the book’s subject. Chastised by a women’s studies major for eyeing up women, Mitchell fantasises about having sex with her but has to correct himself mid-fantasy for making her too submissive.

When he writes about how long novels were perceived by feminist theory as penis extensions, or how “almost overnight it became laughable to read writers like Cheever”, Eugenides knowingly addresses his own position as a postmodernist, but one who loves plot and is a chronicler of suburbia and the family, which is where The Marriage Plot leads us back.

Without the use of hindsight, the characters are stuck in 1983, denied the ability to reflect on their younger selves. But as a portrait of three young people confronting adult life, there are touches of J D Salinger, who is (of course) name-checked here.

Being Eugenides, the book is immensely readable, funny and heartfelt, with instantly beguiling writing that springs effortlessly back and forth over the year’s events.

On balance, it was indeed worth waiting for. You just have to join him on a literature geek’s reference binge to enjoy it.